China’s top spy chief has warned that artificial intelligence could pose a direct threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power, in what is the highest-level and most detailed articulation yet of how Beijing sees the technology’s security risks.

The unusually blunt assessment by Chen Yixin, the head of China’s Ministry of State Security, is in contrast to the warnings dominating the AI debate in the United States, which have focused on the possibility that AI could slip out of human control or pose a threat to humanity itself.

In an article published Sunday in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, Chen called for more party control over AI and stricter government oversight. This, he said, was necessary to protect political stability at home; to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns from “hostile forces”; and to compete militarily with countries like the United States.

Chen referred specifically to U.S. tech companies and their AI models — like Claude Mythos and GPT-5.5-Cyber — as examples of new threats to cybersecurity. He also described the danger that foreign intelligence agencies might use AI for “large-scale espionage” and attacks on China’s critical infrastructure.

The warning from the powerful security agency makes clear that China sees foreign AI models as an active threat to China, according to Henry Gao, a law professor at Singapore Management University. That effectively draws a red line before talks between American and Chinese officials on AI safety risks, expected before a meeting between President Donald Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, on Sept. 24 in Washington.

“Beijing is going into these talks viewing AI safety not as a shared humanitarian mission, but through an adversarial lens,” Gao said. It is making clear to Chinese tech firms and foreign rivals that “data sovereignty and political security will never be traded away for international safety accords,” he added.

Chen’s remarks are not the first time the security agency has spoken about the dangers of AI, but they are the most comprehensive and signal Beijing’s growing concern about the industry. The security chief outlined several ways that AI could pose a threat to China:

— Undermining the security of the Communist Party. The government’s top priority has long been maintaining the power of the ruling party. Chen’s article warns that those with “ulterior motives” could use AI to generate fake videos and audio to wage a “propaganda war” against China.

“They’re worried, among other things, of say a deepfake of a Chinese official saying something that wasn’t actually said, and that spreading rapidly and destabilizing everything,” said Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies Chinese technology and industrial policy. “Someone thinks that Xi Jinping made some announcement which he didn’t actually. That could sow chaos.”

— Attacks on China’s critical infrastructure. Chen wrote that the technical and financial barriers to launching cyberattacks had been drastically lowered because of AI. This, he said, posed “serious risks” to China’s information infrastructure. Last week, a small team of researchers in California demonstrated that risk when they disclosed a hacking tool that could take control of millions of users’ accounts on WeChat, China’s most widely used messaging app.

— Leaks of sensitive information. Chinese users using foreign models could cause large-scale data leaks, the article noted. Anthropic, the company behind Claude and other AI models, said last week that the Chinese startup Moonshot AI had routed queries by its users to Claude. Those queries included sensitive data, including video surveillance linked to the Chinese military, as well as proprietary information from high-profile Chinese technology companies.

— More intense military competition. The U.S. military’s use of AI in the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran was an example of how warfare has been “fundamentally transformed,” Chen wrote. He says that whoever can harness the power of tools such as algorithms to achieve more precise sensing and targeting, “will gain the initiative on the battlefield.”

The warning adds to a growing drumbeat of concern from Chinese officials about the risks of AI. Under Xi, China has deemed AI a strategic technology that is critical to the country’s development and ability to compete with the United States. At the same time, officials have begun to issue warnings and new guidelines for regulating the industry.

Previous warnings from Chinese regulators have tended to focus on specific issues, such as when the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said in July that it had detected a security risk in some versions of Anthropic’s coding tool, Claude Code. Regulators have also repeatedly warned domestic users about the risks of AI assistants like OpenClaw.

“This is now a much more broad-based sort of warning, not about a specific threat from this one model or this one vulnerability, but a broader paradigm shift in how AI will create new risk for China,” said Chan of Brookings.

“It’s about taking these new powerful tools seriously and realizing there are a lot of vulnerabilities and China needs to move faster, and also use AI to patch those vulnerabilities, and defend against these new powerful cyber-actors,” he said.

—

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Lily Kuo/Kenny Holston
c. 2026 The New York Times Company